Collection Scope and Content Note

Correspondence, scrapbooks, and account books pertaining chiefly to Fiske's activities as a book collector, although there are extensive family correspondence and other letters pertaining to his education, his career as a journalist, his activities as a professor and librarian at Cornell University, his interest in chess, and his cultural studies of Iceland and Egypt; included is correspondence of George Lincoln Burr, Wendell Phillips Garrison, George W. Harris, Samuel May, Charles Warner, and others.

Additional correspondence includes instructions to Willard Austin for filing this collection in preparation for Horatio Stevens White's biography of Fiske; letters to him from acquaintances and close friends in the United States; from Italy where he spent the remainder of his years following his resignation from Cornell in 1883; from Egypt and Iceland; and from many other countries. Letters range in subject from social plans to those relating to his library and book collecting. Also, mss., fragments, notes, biographical correspondence, and post-1904 correspondence relating to the Dante and Petrarch Collections at Cornell; Egyptian manuscripts, printed material relating to the Egyptian alphabet, and photographs of Egypt; family photographs; Fiske genealogy; printed material and miscellany. Miscellaneous items include Fiske's notebooks pertaining to the Arabic language and statements of account for the the Fiske Library Fund and the Fiske Estate Library Fund; a whip,
presumed to have been used by Fiske in Iceland in 1874, and an archaic lettered stone.

Also, audiocassettes of lectures on Willard Fiske given by Stephen Weissman, P.M. Mitchell, Elmer H. Antonsen, Louis Pitschmann, and Gould Colman as part of a commemoration of Fiske at Cornell University Library in 1989. These audiocassettes are cataloged individually.

Also included is a bound manuscript index of photographs (photos not included by referred to by number), annotated in French. When first received by the Cornell Library (ca. 1906?), the photographs indexed were originally assigned Harris call numbers 7851 T13-16: T13 covered Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Russia; T14, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany; T15, France; and T16, Italy.